Happy World Usability Day
To Wikipedia, usability is:
“A term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal. Usability can also refer to the methods of measuring usability and the study of the principles behind an object’s perceived efficiency or elegance…”
To the Usability Professional’s Association, usability is:
“An approach to product development that incorporates direct user feedback throughout the development cycle in order to reduce costs and create products and tools that meet user needs. There are many definitions of usability from books by usability professionals…”
To Jakob Nielsen, usability is:
“A quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. Usability has multiple components and is traditionally associated with these five usability attributes: learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, satisfaction…”
To me, usability is simply understanding the impact design has on users.
There’s many ways to get there but it all starts by realizing that usability is a state of mind that reaches beyond usability day.
Today is a good day to ask yourself: « How could I make the world around me, my business or my Website more usable? »
The rest of the year should be enough to turn this into action!
Suggested Reading:
Like this post? Stay Connected with us and Receive Updates Right Away (via RSS)
We should start recompiling our codes and designs so they become more usable for users. That is something that should become a must for all new sites, because new internet era has already started.
We should really start focusing on user experience with respect to software. This is specially needed for business software.
The focus should be not only on the experience of using the software but the entire experience from discovery – trial – deployment – usage – and support.
Currently, most business software don’t really give a great experience to the users. We have launched a comic to express our views on the agony of dealing with enterprise software. You can check it out at http://blog.uhuroo.com